Schizoid Personality: The Fear of Commitment Part 1

To an observer, certain persons may appear to cherish their privacy, are just quiet, like their own company or they like to mind their own business. These and many other reasons may be right but if they are schizoids, they suffer from fear of commitment, an anxiety disorder. And to them, the fear is as real as the daylight. Yet these people have a right to live a worthy life if they can be understood.

Love and relationship is a challenge for the schizoid because it calls for commitment. In order to maintain the boundaries, a schizoid will end up deeply hurting their partner emotionally and could even become physically aggressive. Because any kind of closeness triggers anxiety, the closer the schizoid person draws nearer to someone else, the more the danger looms of loving or being loved. To the schizoid, closeness means surrendering of the self and dependency-- a horrifying imagination.

Tenderness, verbal or emotional expression of affection is alien to this personality. Schizoids often lack empathy and therefore cannot put themselves in another's place. Often schizoids only enters into non-binding and easily dissolved relationships that are devoid of attachment. Such relationships makes the schizoid feel protected from dangers of love commitment.

Individuals with a schizoid personality engage in retaining their self preservation and ego- boundaries. While that is their primary goal, their main problem is the fear of commitment. Schizoids seek after self independence and sufficiency in its extremity and withdraws away from others. They only allow a marginal interaction and if anyone oversteps their boundaries, they interpret it as a threat and can react negatively.

Schizoids avoid intimacy, reducing personal contacts to businesslike relations. They feel comfortable in groups where it is easier to maintain anonymity and closeness. Schizoids create the impression of aloofness, distances, coldness, unapproachable and impersonal. They don't want to be known, so they remain distant even when one has been around them for a long time. If they sense that one has known them, they can be aggressive or hostile without any sufficient grounds.Yet behind these reactions, is the dreadful fear of commitment.

Due to the fear of commitment and intimacy, schizoids don't trust others and even sink deeper into isolation and loneliness. Since affection, intimacy, sympathy, tenderness and love result in coming closer, the schizoid person interprets these as dangerous and could result in hostility and rejection of others. This withdrawal causes them to make assumptions of others, since they know little about others. Their perceptions, imaginations and thoughts about others is distorted. As a result, they are not able to know whether their feelings, perceptions, thoughts and imaginations exists inside them or are real.

For parents and educators, there are some alarm signals that should be taken seriously in children or those in post puberty period: difficulty in forming relations at school, self isolation, avoiding relations with the opposite sex, shunning contact, burying his or her head in books and increased solitude.

Information from Fritz Riemann's book Anxiety

I would suggest that parents or educators exercise caution before branding a child as having a disorder because of the stigma involved. There could be other causes of a child's behavior; and these need to be investigated and excluded.

God, the Holy Spirit is the greatest counselor. Let's engage Him in all things for apart from Him, we can do nothing (John 15:5).